That’s the idea behind the United Federation of Teachers Elementary and Secondary Charter Schools in East New York, Brooklyn. Created in 2005, the schools are the first in the nation to totally involve the United Federation of Teachers, New York’s union of professional educators. The result, supporters say, is an inspiring community environment on the cutting-edge of educational reform.

While a union-run charter school might sound like a contradiction in terms, UFT president and AFT vice president Randi Weingarten has defended the concept – noting that the UFT doesn’t oppose charter schools, it opposes those which don’t honor its collective bargaining agreement. She also says the union used New York City’s chartering process to show that it could put together a school on public school resources that honors this agreement, and at the same time, encourages professional development for teachers.

The UFT’s first charter school opened its doors to kindergartners and first grade students in September 2005. Since then, its expanded to include students through third grade. The UFT also opened a secondary-level charter school in Fall 2006 – a school so popular among local parents that it received over 1,000 applications. It also made a strong impression on teachers – attracting more than 800 applicants for its 18 staff positions.

What makes these union schools different, other than teacher involvement and governance? According to supporters, it’s the ability to promote an intensive, well-rounded curriculum – one that includes science, social studies, physical education and the arts – and to control factors like class size and teacher-student ratios.

At the UFT schools, there are two teachers in every classroom – from kindergarten through the second grade. The class sizes are all low – between 20 and 25 students – to ensure individualized attention. Students are also prepared for life-long personal responsibility, required to participate in weekly school and community service programs. Another bonus of the school, its teachers say, is the ability to take risks in the classroom – because they are covered by the UFT contract.

The UFT schools also boast a high-tech environment – with each classroom featuring several computer stations, wireless Internet access, and mobile computers that can be moved from class to class.

The UFT hopes the school will serve as a blueprint for the creation of more union-run schools nationwide.

It was exactly 25 years ago that President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report that shattered any notion that America’s schools were performing well.

The report – Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform – came to a disturbing conclusion: our education system was falling behind the rest of the world.

“Our Nation is at risk,” the report stated. “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

The 18 members of the Commission made 38 recommendations for reform, divided across 5 major categories: Content, Standards and Expectations, Time, Teaching, Leadership and Fiscal Support. These recommendations set off a series of efforts on a local, state and federal level.

It was not the first time, of course, that America’s schools had come under such scrutiny. In 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik – the first space satellite – it set off a wave of paranoia. That wave resulted in a major push to improve our schools, and a dozen years later one of our greatest accomplishments as a nation: sending a man to the moon.

How have our schools fared since these wake-up calls? And are we still a nation at risk?

Some of the facts about education in America today, many of which are presented in WHERE WE STAND, argue that in many ways, we are. While the U.S. still leads the world as an economic power and innovator, other countries are fast catching up. And when it comes to education, many of them have already surpassed us. America once had the best high school graduation rate, but it has now fallen below 15th among industrialized nations. Our 15-year-olds perform below average in math, science, and problem-solving.

Earlier this year, Education Week published its annual Report Card, which included a portion titled: “A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students are Still at Risk.” Its conclusion? The obstacle to reforms in our schools is political, and ‘vigorous national leadership’ is needed to improve education.

“We’re acting like our jobs are not going to leave, and that we’re going to be able to compete in a global market with a second class education in America – and that day is over,” says Geoffrey Canada, President and Founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone. “We’ve allowed the rest of the world to get ahead of us.”

Welcome to the Web site for “WHERE WE STAND: America’s Schools in the 21st Century.” This 60-minute broadcast, available here in five segments (along with considerable additional footage, reporting and education news. is not aimed at condemning America’s schools or suggesting that they are getting worse. Rather, we wanted to alert the nation to the fact that other countries are investing heavily in their schools and getting better results, and that life in this new century is demanding much from schools and society. Not long ago, such a shift might not have mattered much, but in the “flat world” of the 21st Century our children and our country will be competing on a global stage that is very different. Will we be ready? Will our children be ready? Or will this generation of youth be – as some people have suggested – the first in our nation’s history to experience a lower standard of living than their parents?

The program’s title comes in part from a show CBS aired in January 1958, also titled “Where We Stand.” With that program, CBS made history – using television for the first time to inform and rally the nation. Focused on Russia’s launch of Sputnik in late 1957, the program featured a young Walter Cronkite, and from that point on not only did the country actively follow the “race for space” on television – they followed it on CBS with Cronkrite – all the way until Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.

Of course, the world and especially communication media are different today. With the economy, the environment, energy, and international unrest at the top of most political agendas, many Americans don’t see the needs of our schools in the same way they saw the threat posed by Sputnik. Yet, in the end our success in meeting all current and future challenges is ultimately tied to the success of our education system and how well we develop the most important resource of all: the talent of individuals.

Visitors to this site also will be interested to know that there is a robust national outreach effort happening in the weeks following this broadcast. In more than 40 states, public television stations, in partnership with the Public Education Network, the Learning First Alliance, and others will be using this program to get the nation talking about education and “where we stand.”

My thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for making the broadcast possible, and to PBS for designating it for common carriage, which means that the program airs on all 355 public television member stations nationwide. It’s the gold standard! It’s also a strong statement of how much PBS cares about teachers, students, and their parents.

I’m also grateful to Judy Woodruff, whose career as a broadcast journalist for CNN, NBC, and PBS has been second-to-none. She’s one of the hardest working people in the business, but somehow she still found time to help us with this show. Her interest in WHERE WE STAND was at least in part tied to the work she did creating the series GENERATION NEXT, an honest and bold conversation with our country’s young people, and an effort that will continue to inform all of us in the years ahead.

Finally, I want to thank producer/director/writer Rebecca Haggerty, who worked tirelessly and with great insight on this program. She cares deeply about the issues presented here, and it was a great joy to work with her and her team – especially Molly Knight Raskin and Lisa Gray (who also are the creators of this Web site) – and to learn from them. If this program speaks to you, if it succeeds in any way, it’s largely because of them and the expert guidance we all got from our station President Neal Shapiro – who served as Executive-In-Charge – and my talented colleague Stephen Segaller, Vice President for National Programming.

We hope you enjoy the program and the Web site, and we look forward to your feedback.

Sincerely,

Ronald Thorpe
Executive Producer: WHERE WE STAND
Vice President and Director of Education, Thirteen/WNET and WLIW21

How did Bin Che, the Chinese teacher featured in “WHERE WE STAND,” end up in Belpre, Ohio? Bin was one of 21 teachers from China, Taiwan and Spain visiting Ohio in the 2007-2008 school year, the result of international agreements between the Ohio Department of Education and the Chinese ministry, the Hanban.

Ohio is one of only four states that received a federal grant, called FLAP, for the development of a K-4 Chinese language curriculum.

In Belpre, Chinese classes have inspired students like Roger Lemley, a recent High School Graduate, to continue language studies. Due to budget cuts, however, some districts – including Belpre – are being forced to drop Chinese.

“The first natural resource in any society are the minds of its people.”
– Wendy Puriefoy, Public Education Network

In 1995, America’s college graduation rate was first in the world. Ten years later, it ranked 15th. As so many nations around the world continue to improve their systems of education, America can no longer afford to maintain the status quo. In an ever-changing, increasingly competitive global economy, is the U.S. doing all it can to prepare its students to win jobs and maintain a robust economy?

WHERE WE STAND: America’s Schools in the 21st Century presents a frank evaluation of our educational system’s strengths and weaknesses. Hosted by Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the documentary visits schools throughout Ohio, an important swing state that represents a range of socioeconomic and geographic school districts. The program features schools in urban Cincinnati, suburban Columbus, and rural Belpre.

WHERE WE STAND introduces students, parents, teachers and administrators whose stories illustrate the overwhelming odds and shining successes of education in America. They include Bin Che, an educator from mainland China who teaches Mandarin in rural Ohio; Cherese Clark, principal of a high-poverty school struggling under the pressure of low test scores; Guadalupe Medina, a student at a STEM school (which focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), who, at age 16, has completed all of her high school requirements; and Anne Kuittinen, a Finnish exchange student who earned straight A’s but is now redoing her junior year at home in Finland because the Finnish school system doesn’t accept credits from America.

Making a documentary on education is a huge, unwieldy task, and sometimes we felt like the blind man describing the elephant. Every topic we looked at – teaching, testing, globalization, equity and money – seemed worthy of a series in and of itself. Yet in the end, we were convinced that because these issues in education are inextricably linked, they were all worthy of coverage – even in an hour-long program..

Throughout the production of this documentary, we met so many great, committed educators, with so many inspiring ideas. At Pleasant Hill Academy, a public urban grade school in Cincinnati, Ohio, we experienced the school’s warm, and energizing atmosphere first-hand. The teacher we profiled, Nancy Johnson, regularly takes students to McDonald’s for lunch – a highlight for them – and talks to several of them on the phone regularly. The principal of the school, Cherese Clark, also pours her heart and soul into her job. She greets children by name -often with a hug – at the beginning and end of each day, dressed in impeccable suits and carrying a megaphone.

On the first day we filmed at Pleasant Hill, the school was deep in the throes of preparation for the Ohio Achievement test. Signs exhorting students to do their best on the exam lined the hallways. Students in an after-school club composed chants to pump students up for the test. That relentless focus reflects the practical reality of public schools. Pleasant Hill’s official ranking, based on how many kids are reaching proficiency on state tests, sits just one category above the absolute worst. Ramifications can be severe. If you’re the principal of a under-performing school, failure on the test can put your job on the line.

For Cherese Clark, the goal of bringing all the students at Pleasant Hill up to their grade level is particularly daunting – because they are starting so far below it to begin with.. To keep her expectations in check, Clark says she reminds herself that building a culture of change takes several years. But she also admits that if the school manages to improve significantly, her whoops of delight may reach me on the East Coast.

From the beginning, we were determined to include voices from across the political spectrum in the program, to encourage viewers to think about the different approaches to school reform. Smart, reasonable people can disagree passionately about the best direction for education. Should reform focus only on schools, or should it take into context larger forces, like the situation of a student at home? Do kids need more social services, or more structure? Can our culture place a higher priority on learning, and what’s the best way to facilitate that kind of societal shift? As one of our interview subjects, Professor Sharon Lynn Kagan, noted reforming education is a battle with many fronts. If the debate over education becomes so polarized that it shuts out effective solutions in favor of a rigid adherence to ideology, clearly everyone loses – most of all, students.

Part of that debate concerns the changing global economy. In the piece, we tried to walk the line between overplaying the threat from other countries and recognizing that the world has changed in a way that will have a serious impact on kids in schools today. And while globalization may seem a handy buzzword for bi-coastal sophisticates in the media, we found plenty of people in the small city of Belpre, Ohio, who think and talk about it too. It was in Belpre that we met Bin Che, a young teacher from China, who told me that in China teachers have an easier life but students work much harder. We also traveled to the Northern European country of Finland, where students routinely top international tests of math and science.

In Finland, talk of their educational success sometimes sounded like an overly cheery Christmas card: Our kids are number one in math and science! They think independently! They don’t even start school until they’re almost seven years old! The capital, Helsinki, can feel the same way. The streets are clean. There are no homeless people. The taxi drivers are so courteous they refuse to take a fare unless it’s their turn in the line.

Describing a national culture can be a tricky thing, teetering on the edge of offensive stereotype and meaningless generalities. Still, when you’re talking international comparisons, the specifics of place matter. Finland is a country that prides itself on consensus. When I went to an upper secondary school outside of Helsinki, I was introduced to a representative from the teacher’s union. He reminded me of a Finnish Gerard Depardieu, thoughtfully playing with his long hair during our conversation. I asked him about what the teachers union agitated for. He frowned thoughtfully, then paused. After some internal discussion with his colleagues, he offered, rather tentatively, the issue of class size. For example, he explained, classes with forty students would be far too large. When I asked if he had any such classes, he replied that – Well, he didn’t – but in theory that would be bad.

That element of stoicism extended to salaries as well. Finnish teachers professed to be happy with their compensation. “It’s quite enough,” said English teacher Jaana Bjorklund Vjoulla firmly. One of her young colleagues, who teaches a summer math course, happens to also be a dentist. He stays with teaching because he loves it, and notes that at this stage of his career, his salary as a teacher is just about equal to that of a starting dentist.

Of course, Finland couldn’t be more different than the United States. It’s tiny, has a much smaller gap between rich and poor, and a homogeneous population. Yet it would be silly to overlook some of the reasons for Finland’s success in both schools and society. Better teacher training crosses borders. As for the level of inequity in society, it may be worth remembering that the growing gap between wealthy and working-class Americans has ripple effects that extend into the classroom.

In the end, there are few easy answers to the questions we raised, and we saw that first-hand. While Pleasant Hill Elementary did improve test scores, they fell short of the ambitious targets they set for themselves. At the alternative Metro School in Columbus, Ohio, first-year student DeJane Daniels didn’t return for her second year, despite the fact that she had been thriving there. And Belpre Schools won’t have their Chinese program this year, because they didn’t get another grant. Yet, there are also reasons to hope – and perhaps more importantly, to debate, discuss, and get involved, in these issues in your community.